How about going pro?

November 15, 2007 — dsart

The other day I received a great comment from Alex Garcia on my post entitled If art is a language… He raised the same question which has been bothering me concerning the possibility and the desirability of standards in art. At the moment there seems to be none-not even any one can fight against. This tends to make intelligent criticism difficult if not impossible, and it makes things even more difficult for the artist, though many might not realize it. If all is acceptable, then the true working artist is left to defend his work mainly through marketing.
In any case, Alex, who works in egg tempera, lived here for around a year and a half before he moved on to San Antonio where the art scene. In an email to me he questioned whether people here were really interested in promoting their art professionally since so many seemed to show up in the same local galleries bit nowhere outside of here.
I tend to agree.
On the one hand you have someone like Margarita Cabrera who is a professional through and through and who is doing spectacular things, and then you have some people who seem to be somewhat serious about their art, but who do not know quite how to get their work out there. Then there are lots of people who like showing off at gallery openings but who seem to fail to understand the concept of professional artist; fail to understand that it requires work, honesty, some fundamental basis for what they are doing and, can one dare hope, what other artists have done, are doing . I am continually amazed by the fact that we currently have easier access than ever before in history to what people are doing all over the world, and so few of our local artists seem to be even faintly aware or care what is going outside of this desert. David Sokoledc